Throughout 2020, huge numbers of people have found themselves stuck at home under various lockdown measures to combat COVID-19. To fill their time, a lot of people have turned to video games. Linux is a very popular operating system for gamers, though it’s not perfect. A flaw that people have wanted to be improved is the system’s compatibility with Windows games. You can currently play lots of these games on Linux - our article How to Play Classic Windows Games Us-ing PlayOnLux delves into this further. The problem is that many games are being designed exclu-sively for Windows and aren’t compatible with Linux. The good news is that there’s a workaround.
Collabora, Valve and Proton
Valve, short for Valve Corporation, is a company that specialises in the creation, publication and distribution of video games. In recent years, it’s been looking to make the Linux kernel more com-patible with video games, including those developed for Windows. To that end, it’s been sponsoring Collabora, a company based in Cambridge that specialises in open source consultancy. Valve’s ongoing aim is to use Collabora to enable more people to play Windows games on Linux through emulation, essentially porting over the infrastructure that Windows uses to run its games.
So how has Collabora been making Windows games more accessible? Through the development of Proton, an open source tool that basically enables Windows-exclusive games to be run on top of the Linux operating system without there being any noticeable issues regarding performance or quality.
A spokesperson from Collabora, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi, recently spoke about the company’s ef-forts to make Windows games more accessible on Linux at the Open Source Summit, Europe 2020. He gave a presentation entitled ‘State of Linux Gaming’ and spoke about the ongoing efforts being made by the company to improve Linux’s compatibility with Windows games. He emphasised that Collabora isn’t trying to bring Windows into Linux; instead, it’s trying to make emulation much easier and much more straightforward. Others points brought up in the talk worth mentioning are that Collabora wants to continue maintaining support both for native Linux games and emulated games, and that it would like to see an increase in open source games being created.
Overcoming Problems
A key issue that arises when people try to play Windows games on Linux is that they fail to load at all. This is because of the built-in, anti-cheat software the games have. What Collabora hopes to do is to find a way around this so that games can still be played on Linux devices and that they can still be protected by mechanisms such as the anti-cheat software.
The newest Linux kernel update, 5.11, is expected to happen in December 2020 or January 2021. When this takes place, it’s hoped that Collabora will be able to introduce some sort of software that helps Linux users get around Windows’ security software and enable them to play games on the Linux operating system without problems. Collabora had initially wanted to introduce new software with the Linux kernel update 5.10, but couldn’t get everything sorted in time.
The main reason there’s such a demand for playing Windows games on Linux operating systems is that the number of games developed for Linux is very small. If you compare the two, it’s Windows that has the bigger share of the gaming market and its share is considerably bigger than Linux’s. That’s not to say that games designed for Linux are lacklustre, it’s more the case that Windows has the bigger names and the more popular brands launching on its platform.
The Future of Windows Gaming on Linux
Hopefully in the near future playing Windows-exclusive games on Linux operating systems will be-come more convenient and widespread thanks to the efforts of companies like Collabora. If you’re already into gaming on Linux, we have plenty of articles you may wish to read, such as
Play Clas-sic Titles Such As Sim City and Prince of Persia For Free in Linux Using Dosbox. Browse through our collection of posts and you’ll find quite a few that focus on gaming.
If you own a device that runs on a Linux operating system but want to play Windows games, you may be able to do this with ease very soon indeed. It’s great to see that companies are working hard to improve compatibility and make it easier for people to play games that aren’t necessarily developed for the operating system they’ve decided to use. Maybe this will encourage Windows to make its games more compatible from the start.
Keep your eyes peeled for more updates about Linux and its compatibility with Windows-exclusive games. Some day soon, games will be playable on just about any platform without players encoun-tering problems such as crashes or bugs.
